So Close to You (So Close to You - Trilogy) (4 page)

“Look what I found.” He hands me a wrinkled black-and-white photograph of a tall, slim man standing next to an old car. He’s wearing an army uniform with a tucked-in shirt, high, almost baggy pants, and a cap that sits at an angle on his head. He’s scowling at the camera, his face half hidden in shadow. “This is my father.”

I finger the crumpled edges of the photo. I’ve never seen a picture of my great-grandfather before. “He looks serious.”

Grandpa smiles and leans forward in his chair. “He
was
serious. But he was a good father and a good husband. He was a first lieutenant in the army, and he commanded a lot of men. He was stationed on the Western Front through the fall of forty-three. After the Allies invaded Sicily, he was sent to Camp Hero to work on a secret project. He writes about it in his journal, though he never says what it was.”

His green eyes go cloudy and soft. “When he disappeared, we had no idea what happened. It was June fifth, nineteen forty-four. He went to the base that morning and never came back. His officers told us there was a training accident, that a gun went off by mistake and he died. But they wouldn’t let us see the body, and we could never find any soldiers who were there when it happened. I knew, even then, that something wasn’t right.”

I nod. I’ve heard this story dozens of times before, and I know when to nod, when to murmur my agreement. My grandpa has a compulsive need to constantly rehash the details of what happened to his father, and I never have the heart to stop him.

“As I got older I started to investigate.” He leans forward, and I recognize the excited look on his face. I stare down at the photo in my hands. I hate it when my grandfather gets this worked up—it reminds me of when I was ten, sitting outside the bunker, a sinking feeling growing in my stomach as Grandpa frantically shoved the journal at me.

“I realized that other people knew something wasn’t right about Camp Hero too. People started coming forward about their experiences with the Montauk Project, and all the facts started to fit together like a puzzle. My father disappeared at Hero right as the Project was getting off the ground and was never seen again.”

I avoid his gaze and turn the photo over, examining the writing on the back:
Dean Bentley at House, May 11th, 1944
. Only a few weeks before he disappeared.

“Everything changed after.” Grandpa turns back to his desk and is still, his lined hands resting on the papers in front of him. “Mother got so quiet. It was my father’s parents who really raised me. And my aunt Mary for a while. But she married young and moved away not long after my father disappeared.”

I look up, startled. While my grandfather repeats the story of his father over and over, he rarely talks about the rest of the family. I know almost nothing about my great-aunt Mary or what his mother, my great-grandmother, was like.

“Mary painted the picture that’s hanging in the hallway near the dining room, right?” It’s a landscape of Montauk during fall, bright red and yellow splashes, the trees reaching out toward the edge of the canvas. Just looking at it makes me feel restless.

“Yep.” Grandpa turns to face me. “She was a wild one. She eloped with a soldier from the base not long after my father left, and they moved back to his family farm as soon as the war was over. I think it was in South Carolina? Maybe Georgia. We didn’t see much of her after that. It was so expensive to travel, and it’s a hard life, farming, especially in those days. She came back a few times to visit, and we wrote letters. There was no email then.” He chuckles softly.

“Do you have any photos of you from when you were a kid?” I hand the photograph back to him.

He carefully slips it into the pages of a notebook on his desk. “Most of the family photos were lost after the fire that took my grandparents’ house in sixty-eight. I just found this one in my old treasure chest.”

He picks up a battered red tin box from his desk and hands it to me. It’s small and rusted, with a faded image of a bear on the top. I run my finger over the chipped paint.

“I used to put special knickknacks and things in there when I was little,” he says.

I pry the lid off. It’s warped with time, and the metal scrapes together before popping open. Inside are a bunch of random things: marbles, a small toy soldier, some string, an old bullet. “Why haven’t you shown me this before?”

He takes the box back from my hands. “I had forgotten all about it. I hid it in a loose board underneath my bed decades ago. Yesterday I was down there looking for my slippers and the board came up in my hand. There was the box. After all those years.”

“That’s so cool.”

“You’re telling me. I never told anyone about my treasures. No wait, that’s not true.” His face falls as he clutches the box tightly in both hands. “I told my father. It was a few weeks before he disappeared. I remember he gave me the photo and told me to put it in a safe place. So I showed him my hiding spot. He was the only one who ever knew.”

I lean forward and place my hands over his. “It’s a good thing you found it.” I squeeze his hands gently. “It’s like there’s a part of him still here.”

The window is open. I hear a mourning dove outside, a short, staccato burst of song that repeats again and again. It blends in with the sound of my mother moving around in the kitchen below us, pans clanking together, the faucet turning on and off.

“You’re right.” He pulls away and clears his throat. He carefully puts the photo back into the box and sets it aside. “How did I get such a smart granddaughter, anyway?”

I smile and stand up. “Some people are just born lucky. Now can we please go eat French toast? I’m dying of hunger over here.”

“Dramatic girl,” he says as he rises to follow me from the room.

The kitchen smells like flour and eggs and maple syrup. It’s a large, open space with windows that look out onto the garden. I take a seat at the round wooden table, pushing aside the newspaper and a mug that reads
COME TO MONTAUK FOR FUN IN THE SUN
! Grandpa sits down next to me and picks up a section of the paper and holds it in front of his face. Mom is at the stove, still wearing her workout clothes, sweats and a baggy T-shirt that hangs down to her knees. It’s so different from her normal look—polished suits and shiny hair—that I hardly recognize her.

“Looking good, Mom,” I say as I reach for a jug of orange juice.

“Don’t be a smartass.” She drops three thick slices of French toast onto my plate.

My mom is a self-proclaimed Weekend Mom. During the week she’s busy working for a real estate office in town. When she’s not showing houses, she’s at meetings: for historical preservation, the Montauk Downtown Association, the PTA. Between her schedule and mine, we’ve perfected the art of the quick catch-up—a “hi” and “bye” in the mornings, a kiss good night. But on the weekends she’s all about taking me shopping at the outlets or to the beach on warm days, and she always, always cooks breakfast on Saturday mornings.

I bite into the thick grilled bread, closing my eyes when the sweetness of the syrup hits my tongue. “Oh gawd, thish ish shoo goood.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

I roll my eyes at her tone. “I’m seventeen, Mom. You don’t need to scold me like I’m five.” I hear Grandpa chuckling from behind the paper.

“Even seventeen-year-olds shouldn’t talk with their mouths full. Plus, you’ll always be my baby.” She comes over and puts her hand on my head, smoothing down my sleep-messed hair. “You need to get this cut. It’s all shaggy.”

“That’s the look.” I pull away from her. “Stop, you’re getting French toast in my hair.”

“The look, huh? I guess I’m just an old lady now who doesn’t know anything about style.”

“I don’t know, you’re rockin’ those sweats pretty hard.”

“Watch it,” she snaps, clearly trying not to laugh. “Where’s your father?”

“Comatose in front of the TV.”

“I heard that.” My dad walks into the kitchen, sidling up to my mom as she stands next to the stove. He slips his arm around her, pressing his face into her neck, his dark hair a startling contrast to her pale gold. He’s so tall he almost has to bend in half to reach her. She giggles, pushing him away with her spatula.

I almost gag on my orange juice. “Ew, get a room.”

“We have a room,” he says. “Actually, we have seven rooms. We just let you stay in one of them out of the goodness of our hearts.”

“My dad the comedian.”

He walks over to the table and sits down. He’s in jeans and a flannel shirt, his regular work-wear.

“Are you going into the store today?” I ask.

He nods and fills a plate with food. My grandpa puts down the newspaper and picks up his fork. Mom sits down at the table. There’s a moment of silence as we all concentrate on eating.

“How were your last days of school, Lydia?” Mom asks after a minute.

“Good. I’m glad it’s over.”

Dad points his fork in my direction. “Now you can start working for me full-time. Things are getting crazy down at the shop.”

Dad owns and runs Bentley’s Hardware, and there always seems to be some crisis happening that forces him to go in at all hours. But we all know he loves it—even though he complains, I think he would move into the stockroom if Mom let him.

“Maybe. I’m actually trying to get this internship. At the paper.” I gesture at the
East Hampton Star
folded next to my grandfather’s coffee mug.

Mom smiles. “Honey, that’s great!”

“I don’t know if I’ll get it. I’m waiting to hear. But I sent them some of my clips from this year, and the editor said he liked them.”

“Which clips?” Grandpa asks. “The one about the only female football player?”

I nod. “And the op-ed about gun violence.”

“That’s a good one. You’ll be a shoo-in.”

“Maybe you can still help out part-time,” Dad says. “You’ve got to learn the business for that happy day when I’m sipping mai tais on the beach and plumbing equipment is but a distant memory.”

“You’ll never retire. We all know you love it.”

“Don’t say that. Your mom and I have our hearts set on a condo in Boca Raton.”

“Yeah, right.” I laugh, though the jokes put me slightly on edge. Dad is always talking about how I’ll take over the store someday, and how his legacy will live on in me. I’m not sure he truly believes that I have no intention of sticking around Montauk forever.

“What time are you going in?” Mom asks him.

“In an hour or so. Stacy called in sick for her shift.” He turns to me. “You gonna come help?”

I pause, pushing the last piece of French toast around in circles. “I can’t today.”

“Why not?”

Dad puts his fork down and watches me over steepled hands. He and I have the same high cheekbones, the same heavy-lashed green eyes. But instead of his almost-black hair, I somehow ended up with deep auburn. “If I wasn’t in labor with you for two days, I’d wonder if you were mine,” my blond, brown-eyed mother likes to say.

“We’re going to Camp Hero today,” Grandpa answers. I stare down at my plate. There’s a heavy silence, and I know my parents are exchanging a look.

“Hmmm.” Mom stands up and starts carrying the dishes over to the sink. “Are you sure that’s what you want to do today, Lydia?”

I glance at my parents. They’re both waiting for my reaction. I know they think my grandfather is slightly unhinged—and sometimes I think the same thing. I also know that they’re unwilling to play along and often wonder why I am. But they’ve never stood in the way of me making my own choices about anything, and that’s one of the things I love the most about them.

My mom is giving me an out with her question. I could say no, call Hannah, and go hang out at the beach all day. But then I’d be disappointing my grandfather, and I can’t bear to do that.

I turn to smile at him. “It’s exactly what I want to do today.”

W
e
drive down the hill near our house, past the red-and-white brick elementary school, around the pond in the middle of town, through the short downtown strip, and out onto the highway. I can see the beach and the water beyond the dunes. There are people walking the shore even though the air is thick and foggy. The weather reminds me of the first day I went to Camp Hero: the dark clouds forming circles above the water, the waves rough against the rocks.